“The operator recently had to re-record all of its onboard announcements so that they were compatible with its new fleet of trains.”
I call bs on this. They lost the audio files, right?
Knowing Northern, they were probably all stored on floppy disks anyway
It will probably be that there is a load more announcements possible on newer trains, so rather than only doing the missing bits with a new voice actor, they may as well do the lot so that it’s consistent
Bold of you to assume Northern paid a voice actor and didn’t just sit a random driver down in front of a microphone. /joke
Close. Two random employees, neither of them drivers:
The new onboard announcements are being recorded by Peter Corley and Laura Palmer, two of Northern’s employees, who were chosen for having “nice voices”. Corley is a conductor based in York with a ripe Yorkshire accent. Palmer is also based in York as Northern’s cybersecurity and compliance manager, but, more controversially, is actually from Essex. “That makes her a northerner by choice, which is always nice,” said a Northern Trains PR person
I really hope Laura Palmer was born pre-1990, because naming your child after a fictional teenager who may or may not have been murdered by her father is pretty grim.
It is one of those annoying things when you move to a new area learning the ‘actual’ pronunciation of places though. I remember moving to Yorkshire and learning that Keighley is pronounced ‘keeth-lee’ the hard way.
But yeah, you would expect the train companies running the area to get it right more often then not I suppose. Though we are talking about Northern here…
How did you think it was pronounced?
Not judging you for not magically knowing how random place names are pronounced or anything, genuinely curious.
I would pronounce it “kee-lee” as an non-UK person. I would never guess that there’s a T in there, because there isn’t one.
It’s more of a f sound (as in rough, enough).
As @rambaroo says below I thought it was ‘kee-lee’. My second guess would have been ‘kay-lee’.
Looking forward to the “Now trundling up to Cass” anouncement
Funny thing, when I was growing up there, depending on which side of the town you lived on you pronounced it one of two different ways.
Neither of which was slay-th’wait.
Lemme guess: “slau-it” vs. “slaw-it”?
Got it in one! Or, two. You got it in two.
This brings back painful memories of when I worked at a call centre and had to ring people all around the country on behalf of the job centre. Would have to read out a thing that basically said “you recently advertised a position for a <whatever> at the <placename> job centre, is that correct?”
Some place names are HARD! And people get really mean to what is obviously a teenage girl on the phone who isn’t from around there and doesn’t know how to say it 😭
Probably had some of these tape players
